The Kaleidoscope of Activism (Part 2)

Below is a catalogue of activist methodologies, defined and listed according to aims, vulnerabilities, recommendations, and real-world examples. This categorization may help you to develop some ideas about how to advance your movement, and to locate your efforts within the many types of activism.

Aim: Force a shift in legislature, public policy, political processes, and/or institutional structures.

Vulnerabilities: Long-term, arduous and slow processes can lead to activist burnout, need people working on the inside, the institutions are unable/unwilling to accept citizen input, state/police action can be incited against political activists.

Recommendations: Connect movement to other types of activism in order to maintain hope, energy, community, and fresh connection to mission. May have to accept a degree of leadership and ordinance structures that seem similar to opposed structures.

Aim: Engage the internet as a low-cost, populist, decentralized, independent, high-speed, forward-looking communicative exchange forum with a global reach. Develop a discussion and a community in the public sphere, and also reach beyond your immediate locality.

Aim: “Be the change you wish to see” á la Gandhi, and free personal pains and traumas from acting as obstacles to group progress; instead of reacting to the past, occupying present conditions with flexibility and confidence.

Recommendations: Remain in relationship with others and allow community to buffer egocentrism and to provide feedback on personal actions. Constant cultivation of epistemological humility, and accepting awareness of the reality of personal flaws and failures. Find middle way between internal moral center and accepting valuable external feedback about your impact on surrounding community.

Vulnerabilities: Can be hyper-specialized and elitist; historically inegalitarian with regard to gender and social class balance; entrenched academic systems can reinforce status quo. Education and discourse are foundational yet partial components of social transformation.

Recommendations: Supplement with other forms of public sphere activism; develop pedagogical methodologies to reach multiple social classes and learning styles; strive for demographic, race, and gender balance and inclusion of marginalized social groups; challenge hegemonic Western-centric conceptions; explore non-traditional approaches to topics; encourage educators to cultivate reflexivity and understand their biases and investments.

Examples: Pontifical Council on Interreligious Relations, Pluralism Project, Faith and Politics Institute, the field of “theologies of religions.”

Recommendations: Supplement spiritual activism with other immersive and impacting community practices.

Examples: UN World Interfaith Harmony Week, Week of Prayer for World Peace, Assisi World Day of Prayer, various houses of worship and spiritual practice.

COMMUNITARIAN/RELATIONAL ACTIVISM

Methodologies: Developing community solidarity with social events and encounters. Formats include dialogue, storytelling, travel seminars, shared meals and celebrations.

Aim: To encourage friendships, and incite re-humanization and normalization processes that disconfirm negative stereotypes. Exposure to multiple interpretations and perspectives.

Vulnerabilities: Encountering “the other” can be challenging on psychological and existential level; limited transformational impact; expectations to understand and be understood may be too high.

Recommendations: Participants should be prepared and supported to apply themselves to conflicts, misinterpretations, personal de-centering, and disagreements with a fundamental commitment to full presence and nonviolence. As Rilke wrote, “Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them.” Participants should embrace with devout agnosticism the impossibility of fully entering the other’s experience, and the limits of language to fully convey sentiment and experience. Refresh the social encounter with low-pressure opportunities to connect and share the space, to bring out the best qualities of participants, and to develop positive impressions of each other.

Author Biography

Jenn Lindsay is a PhD Candidate at Boston University's Graduate
Division of Religious Studies, where she studies how people and
communities encounter religious differences, and how interfaith
dialogue can impact these encounters. She is presently conducting
ethnographic dissertation research at Confronti Magazine in Rome,
analyzing the nature and networks of interfaith dialogue in Italy.
Jenn uses her research and her documentary films on religious
communities to encourage reflection about religion “outside the
box”--beyond institutions and policies and within real lives and
relationships. She earned her Master of Divinity with an emphasis in
Interfaith Relations at Union Theological Seminary in New York City,
where she served as co-chair of the Interfaith Caucus and as the
senate Minister of Fun. She hails from San Diego, California and
worked for a decade in New York City as an independent musician and
filmmaker.

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About State of Formation

State of Formation, founded as an offshoot of the Journal of Interreligious Studies (JIRS), is a program of the Betty Ann Greenbaum Miller Center for Interreligious Learning & Leadership at Hebrew College and Boston University School of Theology.